20330 LANCE SERGEANT ALBERT GEORGE FOSTER
8TH (SERVICE) BATTALION EAST SURREY REGIMENT
KILLED IN ACTION
4TH AUGUST 1918
AGED 22 YEARS
Albert George Foster, more often known as George, had been born in Wissett, a village lying to the north of Halesworth, in the second quarter of 1896, the fifth child of Frederick, an agricultural labourer and his wife Emma (née Field). By the time George was due to begin his schooling the family had moved to a farm worker’s cottage on Fenn Farm, Halesworth (see below). On leaving the boy’s school in 1910 the young George found work as a trainee boot fitter/shoemaker employed by Mr Herbert Leckenby of the Halesworth Boot Factory, then located in Bridge Street. On the 13th January 1914, possibly looking to earn a little more money – 1s 2d (6p) a day for a raw recruit – he enlisted into the town’s Territorial Company, becoming a Private Soldier with the Regimental number of 1805. Over the following months he regularly attended the weekly drill nights and weekend exercises so that by the beginning of August 1914, when the men of the Halesworth Company joined the remainder of the 4th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, for their annual fourteen-day training camp held that year in Great Yarmouth, young George had become well thought of by his comrades. As the men had left the town rumours had been circulating of a possible war with the Kaiser’s Germany. Within two days these rumours had become so strong that the men of the Battalion were returned to their home locations in preparation for a general mobilisation. On the 4th August Great Britain declared war on Germany after their troops had invaded neutral Belgium. It was at midnight on the same day that the order to mobilise was received at the Rifle Hall, with the Territorials boarding the train for Ipswich during the afternoon of the following day. Shortly after they were moved to their designated war station at Felixstowe.
On its formation in 1908 the Territorial Force conditions of service were that the entire organisation could only be used in a home defence role. However, from 1910 onwards, any individual soldier who wished to do so could volunteer to sign the Imperial Service Obligation or Pledge which would then commit them to serve overseas at the time of an emergency. Several of the Halesworth men had signed the pledge which then had given them the right to proudly wear a small white metal badge above their right-hand tunic pocket, bearing the legend of IMPERIAL SERVICE. In an open letter written by the Reverend A C Moore on the 31st August and published in the Halesworth Times newspaper he lists all of the men from the town who at that time were serving in the country’s armed forces. Of the sixty-two local Territorials he showed that some twenty-three had up until that point signed the obligation, although at the time of writing his list it was somewhat out of date as on the 15th August 1914 the order had been given to separate the two classes of Territorial soldiers. This is when several more of the Halesworth men then signed the pledge to stay with their friends and prepare for the battles that lay ahead. While the home service men were despatched to the North Norfolk coast to prepare the anti-invasion defences, George remained in the second group, possibly due to him having not reached the legal age of nineteen years which at that time was the youngest age that a British soldier had to have reached to serve abroad.
Fortunately, due to his pre-war Territorial Force enlistment papers surviving, it becomes clear that George continued in what became known as the 4th (Reserve) Suffolks up until the June of 1915 when they changed their title to that of the 64th Provisional Battalion. This became one of several units that had been formed from the Second and Third line Territorials who had not signed to serve overseas or were of a lower medical category than was required to serve in the field army. Just six months later all of this would change again with the introduction of the Military Service Act of 1916 which then introduced compulsory conscription for those men who were deemed fit between the ages of eighteen and forty years to be called up to serve in the armed forces. George’s records show that on the 5th April 1916 he was discharged from the Territorial Force, having served a total of one year and eighty-five days of Embodied Service with a further eight months of service prior to the declaration of war.
On leaving his Territorial friends and, probably more importantly, his Cromer sweetheart Mary Louise Kirby, known by George’s family as Louie, he then travelled to Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex where he was conscripted to serve as 20330, a Private Soldier in the 11th (Reserve) Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment. Here, no doubt due to him having served for the previous two years with the Territorials, he would have quickly passed through or bypassed the recruit training programme, being posted to the Regiments 7th (Service) Battalion then serving in France. It is possible that he joined them as a casualty replacement after they had taken part in the opening phase of the Somme battle, where their 37th Brigade alone had suffered almost one thousand and one hundred casualties.
Over the twenty or so months George was with his battalion, which continued to serve on the Western Front, where they played a part in several of the major actions fought during this time, he had also received promotion to the rank of Corporal. By the beginning of 1918 the 7th East Surreys had returned to the region of the Somme where in February they became one of several units to be disbanded. This was due to the whole army having lost so many men that it was getting difficult to replace them. The remnants of his battalion were then transferred to their sister battalion, the 8th East Surreys. On joining them George, now serving as a Lance Sergeant, became the senior other rank in command of his Company’s Lewis machine guns. These light automatic weapons had begun to replace the much heavier Vickers machine guns within infantry battalions, the Vickers guns being centralised into the newly formed Machine Gun Corps that had joined the British Army’s order of battle in October 1915.
It is believed that George, at some time in the month of August 1918, would have been due a period of home leave as, over the three preceding Sundays in July, the marriage banns of Albert George Foster, shown as Now Serving with the Army in France and Mary Louise Kirkby of the parish of Overstrand in the town of Cromer, Norfolk, had been called in preparation for their forthcoming wedding. Sadly it was not to be, as on the night of the 31st July and the 1st August, the battalion war diary of the 8th East Surreys shows that they had relieved the 32nd Battalion Australian Infantry in the front line to the south of the village of Morlancourt, France. It was after the relief and with the battalion settling in that George had met his death. In an article published in the Halesworth Times on the 13th August 1918, in which his parents announced his loss, it had printed extracts of a letter that they had received from his Company Officer who, as can be seen, had held George in very high esteem: –
“I very deeply regret having to inform you that your son was killed by the explosion of a shell. From the account of Private Harrison, who was close to him at the time, it appears that the shell fell right in the trench as he rounded a corner. It was at once seen that he was beyond aid, and death must have been instantaneous and painless. In your great sorrow I desire to express the sincere sympathy of myself and all ranks of the company, and I have no doubt that some of your son’s comrades will wish to express for themselves something of their sorrow over his death. As N.C.O. in charge of Lewis guns your son showed himself thoroughly capable.
In the social life of the company his loss is no less great, very specially in our football team, in which he was the best player. I shall always remember him for his unfailing cheerfulness and readiness to lend himself for the benefit of the company at all times.”
After his death, George’s remains were removed from the battlefield and laid to rest in the Querieu British Military Cemetery where he lies today.
On the first anniversary of his loss his family together with his fiancée Louis had printed in the town’s newspaper a Memoria in his memory with the following verse-
“Tis sweet to know that we shall meet,
Where parties are no more
And that the boy we loved so well,
Has only gone before”
Shortly after his death in action, his mother Emma had been awarded a small pension of 5s 0d (25p) per week with a combined war gratuity payment of £10 0s 0d (£10.0p).
As with all of the other war dead his mother would have been able to claim his medal entitlement of the British War and Victory medal pair and the memorial plaque and scroll.
The location of these awards is unknown.
Recently I have gratefully received some further information from a family member regarding George’s fiancée Mary Louise Kirby. It appears that he could well have received a period of home leave in April, as it transpires that by July when their marriage bands had been read at Cromer, she would have been some four months pregnant. At the time of the child’s birth, a son Thomas George in December 1918, his father had been dead for some five months, therefore his birth in Cromer had been registered under his mother’s family name. While going through her pregnancy she must have kept in contact with George’s family, eventually moving to Halesworth. A report in the Halesworth Times on the 17th December 1919 stated that she had married George’s older brother Charles, who himself had served in Palestine with the Royal Engineers. Their marriage being held at the town’s Congregational Church on the 14th December. After their wedding, baby Thomas then adopted his father and stepfather’s name of Foster.
With thanks to Alan Foster for the further information.
The Bridge leading to Fen Farm from Chediston